When confronted with an ethical dilemma, most of us like to think we would stand up for our principles. But we are not as ethical as we think we are. In Blind Spots, leading business ethicists Max Bazerman and Ann Tenbrunsel examine the ways we overestimate our ability to do what is right and how we act unethically without meaning to. From the collapse of Enron and corruption in the tobacco industry, to sales of the defective Ford Pinto, the downfall (...) of Bernard Madoff, and the Challenger space shuttle disaster, the authors investigate the nature of ethical failures in the business world and beyond, and illustrate how we can become more ethical, bridging the gap between who we are and who we want to be. Explaining why traditional approaches to ethics don't work, the book considers how blind spots like ethical fading--the removal of ethics from the decision--making process--have led to tragedies and scandals such as the Challenger space shuttle disaster, steroid use in Major League Baseball, the crash in the financial markets, and the energy crisis. The authors demonstrate how ethical standards shift, how we neglect to notice and act on the unethical behavior of others, and how compliance initiatives can actually promote unethical behavior. They argue that scandals will continue to emerge unless such approaches take into account the psychology of individuals faced with ethical dilemmas. Distinguishing our "should self" from our "want self", the authors point out ethical sinkholes that create questionable actions. Suggesting innovative individual and group tactics for improving human judgment, Blind Spots shows us how to secure a place for ethics in our workplaces, institutions, and daily lives. (shrink)

In daily life we take it for granted that our minds have conscious control of our actions, at least for most of the time. But many scientists and philosophers deny that this is really the case, because there is no generally accepted theory of how the mind interacts with the body. Max Velmans presents a non-reductive solution to the problem, in which ‘conscious mental control’ includes ‘voluntary’ operations of the preconscious mind. On this account, biological determinism is compatible with experienced (...) free will. Velmans’ theory is put to the test by nine critics: Ron Chrisley, Todd Feinberg, Jeffrey Gray, John Kihlstrom, Sam Rakover, Ramakrishna Rao, Aaron Sloman, Steve Torrance andRobert Van Gulick, followed by Velmans' reply. (shrink)

Over the past century or more, cognitive neuropsychologists have discussed many of the issues raised in this volume. On the basis of this literature, we argue that autism is not a single homogeneous condition, and so can have no single cause. Instead, each of its symptoms has a cause, and the proper study of autism is the separate study of each of these symptoms and its cause. We also offer evidence to support the radical view advanced by Stoljar and Gold (...) in this volume, namely, that in explaining such syndromes the cognitive level of explanation has priority over the neuroscientific. (shrink)

Explanation is a perennially hot topic in philosophy of science. Yet philosophers have exhibited a curious blind spot to the questions of how explanatory projects develop over time, as well as what processes are involved in generating their developmental trajectories. This paper examines these questions using research into the end-Permian mass extinction as a case study. It takes as its jumping-off point the observation that explanations of historical events tend to grow more complex over time, but it goes beyond this (...) observation by scrutinizing the processes responsible for generating this pattern. Surveying several decades of research into the end-Permian extinction, I suggest that the principal “driver” of explanation in geohistory is non-explanatory work: work that is undertaken to increase our descriptive understanding of a phenomenon, not to test a particular explanatory claim. Non-explanatory work drives explanation by imposing or eliminating demands on explanation, and by furnishing new resources for constructing explanatory models. Explanations grow more complex because the demands on explanation tend to increase with ongoing characterization of the target phenomenon, and characterization tends grows the roster of explanatory resources. However, the fact that non-explanatory work sometimes eliminates demands on explanation means that this trend is not irreversible. I suggest that to achieve a more rounded view of the dynamics of explanation, philosophers should ask how research into complex phenomena is organized, as well as how explanatory progress depends upon the coordination of different kinds of material and epistemic resources. (shrink)

This is the first English translation of _Causalite´ et Lois de La Nature,_ and is an important contribution to the theory of causation_._ Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation (...) and law play a prominent role. (shrink)

Vorlesungen Kants über Metaphysik aus drei Semestern ist ein unveränderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1894. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernährung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitäten erhältlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bücher neu und trägt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur und historischem Wissen auch für (...) die Zukunft bei. (shrink)

Radically Rethinking Copyright in the Arts: A Philosophical ApproachYoungJames O. Routledge. 2020. pp. 184. £120.

Le présent volume : Fichte, la philosophie pratique, a pour ambition de présenter la philosophie pratique de Fichte en tenant compte de l'état actuel de la recherche, intégrant la meilleure connaissance de la seconde philosophie de l'auteur qu'on peut avoir depuis que sont rendus accessibles de nombreux textes de cette période en allemand, et grâce à des traductions en français, notamment par les soins d'un certain nombre d'auteurs de ce volume. Les divers aspects abordés permettent de montrer que ce thème (...) radical détermine de façon essentielle l'ensemble des branches du système de Fichte. On voit ainsi que Fichte brosse une détermination radicale et générale de ce qui est à partir de l'agir, tant sur le plan des institutions, que de celui de la nation, de la politique, du droit et de la morale : tous ces concepts renvoient chez lui à des réalités en mouvement, ce mouvement étant leur vie, et leur vie étant l'expression de l'agir de l'homme conforme à son concept. Tout en étant un théoricien du concept et de la loi, Fichte confirme ainsi sa place dans la lignée des penseurs du devenir, avant Nietzsche et Bergson, qui, par-delà leurs différences, lui doivent beaucoup, chacun à sa manière, sur ce point. (shrink)

Einleitung.--Das irrationale in der mathematik.--Der verfall der anschauung.--Mathematik und ästhetik.--Das unendliche.--Intuitionismus, logizismus und formalismus.--Betrachtungen über den gegenstand der mathematik.--Anmerkungen und nachweise.--Wörterbuch der disziplinen.

In thought insertion, subjects experience thoughts which they claim not to be their own. What they claim, it is typically said, is that the thought is not theirs in the sense that they are not the agent or author of the thought. But what does it mean to be the agent or author of a thought? The most intuitive idea is that for a thought to be one's own means for the thought to causally originate within the subject. I defend (...) this analysis against rivaling accounts and discuss several challenges that have not been recognized so far. (shrink)

The proliferation of late of disciplines beginning in “neuro”—neuroeconomics, neuroaesthetics, neuro–literary criticism, and so on—while welcomed in some quarters, has drawn a great deal of critical commentary as well. It is perhaps natural that scholars in the humanities, especially, tend to find these “neuro”-prefixes irritating. But by no means all of them: there are those humanists who discern in this trend a healthy development that has the potential of “revitalizing” the notoriously bookish humanities. Neurohistory is a case in point, typically (...) being dismissed by historians while finding more sympathetic consideration elsewhere. While it sides with the former position, this essay attempts to develop a more complex picture. It will suggest that defiant humanists may underestimate the extent to which they are already participating in a culture profoundly tuned toward a quasi-naturalistic construction of the mind/brain as an embodied, situated, and distributed thing. The roots of this construction will be traced into the popular, academic, and technological discourses that began to surround the “user” in the 1980s, with special emphasis on the concomitant assault on “cognitivism.” What is more, the very same story—insofar as it demonstrates the complicity of the “postclassical” mind with our own man-made and “digital” age—will serve to complicate the neuro-optimists’ vision of human nature exposed by a new kind of science. (shrink)